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Artist or Maker: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

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Provenance: Anonymous sale; Selected Paintings and Watercolours, Woolley & Wallis, Salisbury, 28 October 1981, lot 152.

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Notes: THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN


An iconic image

Of all Rossetti's compositions, Proserpine most richly deserves that overworked but useful adjective 'iconic'. If we had to represent him by one all-embracing image, we could not do better than settle for this. No doubt its power is essentially intrinsic; rather like G.F. Watts in Hope or Landseer in The Monarch of the Glen, Rossetti has somehow lighted on a concept that not only captures the essence of his vision but has a unique capacity to haunt the viewer's imagination. But there are two circumstances that lend force to the image and give it a resonance that it might not otherwise possess. One is the fact that the model is Jane Morris, with all that this implies in terms of autobiographical (or, as Rossetti himself would have put it, 'autopsychological') significance. The other is the sheer relentlessness with which the artist pursued his theme.

Jane Morris

As anyone with even the vaguest awareness of Pre-Raphaelitism knows, Jane Morris's features are integral to our perception of Rossetti's work. He was an artist for whom female beauty was an essential vehicle of expression, and who was consequently dependent on a series of models who, at any given point in his career, embodied his ideal and shaped his vision. With many he was also emotionally involved, although this was by no means always the case. Jane reigned supreme as his muse during his later years, and indeed had only one real rival in his galaxy of beauties. This was Lizzie Siddal, who had played a similar role at an earlier date and whom he had married in 1860.

Jane was eleven years younger than the man to whom she owes her immortality. Born in Oxford in 1839, she was of humble origin, her father being a stablehand or ostler living and working in Holywell. She was discovered by the Pre-Raphaelites in the autumn of 1857, when Rossetti and a team of assistants, including the young William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, came down to paint murals illustrating Malory's Morte d'Arthur in the debating chamber of Benjamin Woodward's new building for the Oxford Union. Rossetti and Burne-Jones saw her one evening at the theatre, and Rossetti, struck by her beauty, asked her to sit for the figure of Guinevere in his Union mural.

Even at this stage they seem to have been mutually attracted, but Rossetti had long been engaged to Lizzie Siddal. It was therefore Morris, who had also fallen in love with Jane and was using her as a model, who proposed marriage. The wedding took place in Oxford in April 1859, and the young couple settled at Red House, Upton, in Kent, designed for them by their friend Philip Webb. The furnishing of this house, to which Jane's skill as a needlewoman made an important contribution, led directly to the founding of the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 'fine-art workmen', in 1861, an event fraught with implications for the Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts movements.

In May 1860 Rossetti and Lizzie were finally married, but in February 1862 Lizzie died from an overdose of laudanum, probably taking her own life. Rossetti thereupon left their bohemian 'crib' overlooking the Thames at Blackfriars and established himself in the large house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, that was to be his home until his own death twenty years later. The Morrises remained at Red House until 1865, when, with two young daughters, they moved to Queen Square, Bloomsbury, thus enabling Morris to be nearer his work. In fact they were now living literally 'over the shop', the firm sharing the same premises. By now it was a flourishing business, having scored a great success with its stand at the International Exhibition at South Kensington in 1862. Morris was also deeply involved with The Earthly Paradise, the cycle of stories in verse that was to make his name as a poet when it was published in 1868-70. But his marriage was far from perfect. Jane had never really loved him, marrying him at least partly for his wealth and social position, while Morris, though fond of her, was too emotionally reserved and too wrapped up in his work to be a zealously attentive husband. With Rossetti now a widower, the stage was set for a revival of the intimacy engendered when Jane was sitting for him in Oxford in 1857.

Signs of Rossetti's rekindled infatuation were apparent as early as the summer of 1865, when he invited Jane to Cheyne Walk to pose in the garden for a set of now well-known photographs (fig. 2). The same year saw her sitting to him again for drawings, and by 1868 she was modelling for a formal portrait (Kelmscott Manor), as well as for more imaginative compositions. Most of his greatest later works were inspired by his love for Jane, from the Mariana of 1870 (Aberdeen Art Gallery) to The Day Dream (Victoria & Albert Museum), his last major picture, commissioned by Constantine Ionides in 1879. The series includes not only Proserpine but Pandora, a chalk version of which has twice appeared in these Rooms in recent years (fig. 3).

Rossetti's affair with Jane Morris lasted from the late 1860s to about 1875. During this period they contrived to spend considerable amounts of time together in the country, notably at Kelmscott Manor (fig. 4), the sleepy old Cotswold house on the upper Thames of which Rossetti and William Morris took a joint tenancy in May 1871. They were there from July to September that year while Philip Webb was carrying out alterations to Rossetti's studio in Cheyne Walk. Rossetti then returned to London, where the following year he was to face the most traumatic crisis of his entire career. In May 1872 Robert Buchanan re-issued his scurrilous attack on Rossetti and Swinburne, The Fleshly School of Poetry, in pamphlet form. When the article had first appeared the previous year, Rossetti's response had been contempt, but now its effect on a constitution already weakened by insomnia, the chloral he took to relieve it, and the frustration of his love for Jane, was devastating. On 2 June he suffered a severe nervous breakdown; six days later he attempted to commit suicide by taking, like Lizzie a decade earlier, an overdose of laudanum. Friends whisked him away to Scotland to recuperate, but only Kelmscott could give him the peace he craved. He returned on 24 September, and was to remain there, often with Jane and her daughters, for the best part of the next two years.

Rossetti's gloomy state of mind and the drastic remedies to which he resorted cast a heavy shadow over his relationship with Jane, and were the main reasons why she brought the affair to an end. When another lover, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, later asked her if she had really loved Rossetti, she replied: 'Yes, at first, but it did not last long. When I found that he was ruining himself with chloral and that I could do nothing to prevent it, I left off going to him.' Gently but firmly she withdrew following a particularly depressing stay at Aldwick Lodge, Bognor, in the winter of 1875-6, during which Rossetti had painted her as Astarte Syriaca, the goddess of love in her most baleful, almost threatening, mode. But she continued to sit for him as far as her indifferent health and family commitments allowed, and they corresponded until a few months before Rossetti's death in April 1882.

Morris was an indulgent if not a complacent husband, determined to put a civilised face on things whatever his inner torment. He sought solace in work and in two visits to Iceland in 1871 and 1873. He also found some compensation for his failure as a husband in intimate friendships with two women: Aglaia Coronio, the sister of his patron Constantine Ionides, and Georgiana Burne-Jones, the wife of his closest friend and collaborator, who had marital problems of her own.

Needless to say, the exact nature of the affair has been the subject of intense curiosity. Despite the discretion with which it was conducted, it inevitably caused gossip. William Bell Scott, for one, was convinced he had caught the lovers spending the night together in October 1871, soon after their first stay at Kelmscott. Yet Jane's biographer, Jan Marsh, has argued that the liaison was a passionately romantic attachment, with echoes of the old conventions of courtly love, rather than a full-blown physical relationship. Jane later told Blunt that she had never quite 'given herself' to her lover, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary she must be believed. After all, it was in neither of their interests to reduce the affair to what Marsh calls 'a sordid adulterous level'. Too much was at stake in terms of respectability and the idealised view that Rossetti at least took of their circumstances.

The fact is that we shall never know the full story. Both the Rossetti and the Morris families were keen to stifle speculation, and the subject is studiously avoided in the older literature. Jane herself was at pains to cover her tracks, burning nearly all Rossetti's letters to her for the crucial years 1870-1877, and stipulating that hers to him should be similarly destroyed by his executors after his death. Even those that escaped the flames were long under embargo in the British Museum, only being opened in 1964, fifty years after Jane's death, and not published until 1976. They show clearly enough that the couple retained a deep affection for one another long after the affair had cooled. They are also full of information about the circle's daily lives. But there are, unsurprisingly, no startling revelations.

Proserpine was not only modelled by Jane but has been seen as a coded comment on the couple's predicament. Rossetti originally conceived the figure as Eve holding the apple. He transformed her into Proserpine by the simple expedient of changing the fruit in her hand to a pomegranate, describing the new theme as follows:

The figure represents Proserpine as Empress of Hades. After she was conveyed by Pluto to his realm, and became his bride, her mother Ceres importuned Jupiter for her return to earth, and he was prevailed on to consent to this, provided only she had not partaken of any of the fruits of Hades. It was found, however, that she had eaten one grain of a pomegranate, and this enchained her to her new empire and destiny. She is represented in a gloomy corridor of her palace, with the fatal fruit in her hand. As she passes, a gleam strikes on the wall behind her from some inlet suddenly opened, and admitting for a moment the light of the upper world; and she glances furtively towards it, immersed in thought.

It is not hard to see why biographers have read so much into this choice of subject. They argue that the picture's mood of gloomy forboding is a projection of Rossetti's own troubled state of mind, while at the same time recognising a metaphor for the triangular relationship between him and the Morrises. Morris is cast in the sinister role of Pluto, keeping Jane captive in an unhappy marriage from which she is unable to escape into the daylight of Rossetti's love.

A 'most difficult puzzle'

We do not know exactly how aware Rossetti was of this parallel, although it can hardly have escaped him, but there is every sign that he was obsessed by the composition itself. 'It is a very favourite design of mine,' he told his patron F.R. Leyland in October 1873, and from the outset he seemed determined to give it definitive expression. 'I am hard at work on a picture of Proserpine,' he had informed another friend, the painter G.P. Boyce, earlier that year, 'which I have begun and re-begun time after time, being resolved to make it the best I could do.' Quite apart from any deep-seated element of autobiography, he was haunted by a fear that he could never do justice to Jane's beauty. 'How nice it would be,' he once told her, 'if I could feel sure I had painted you once for all so as to let the world know what you were - but everything I do from you is a disappointment.'

The dogged persistence that drove him to 'begin and re-begin' the picture 'time after time' has resulted in an art-historical problem of daunting complexity. Proserpine, wrote H.C. Marillier in his great Rossetti monograph of 1899, 'has a very complicated history attached to it, and is without exception the most difficult puzzle in connection with his artistic work'. Marillier felt that he had 'unravelled the main facts' for the first time, but in truth he had only scratched the surface. Virginia Surtees shed invaluable light on the subject in her catalogue raisonné of 1971, and copious information has recently emerged in the comprehensive new edition of Rossetti's letters that has been appearing since 2002 and has now, with the publication of Volume VI, reached the year 1874. Indeed, the latest volume has a seventeen-page Appendix devoted to the oil versions of the composition as documented in the foregoing correspondence. Even this, however, is far from being the end of the matter, as the author of the Appendix, Allan Life, observes. Many questions remain unanswered, and the Appendix is only concerned with oil versions. Drawn ones are not discussed unless they are relevant to the oils.

In all, eight versions of the design were committed to canvas, although some were cut down to form independent pictures, remained unfinished, or flit like ghosts through the records and may not even survive. As early as January 1873 Rossetti was reporting to his agent Charles Augustus Howell that he had attempted Proserpine '5 times on 5 different canvases'. A year later the number had risen to seven, and an eighth version was painted in the last years of his life.

The best-known version is the one in Tate Britain (fig. 5). Although more or less complete by June 1873, it was subsequently revised and sold to Frederick Leyland, the Liverpool shipowner who acquired so many of Rossetti's important later works. It eventually reached him early in 1874, the year it is dated. At the Leyland sale, held at Christie's in May 1892, it was bought by W. Graham Robertson, who gave it to the Tate in 1940.

Almost equally familiar is the version dated 1877 that belonged to that great Rossetti enthusiast L.S. Lowry. He lent it for many years to the Manchester City Art Gallery, and it appeared in the major Pre-Raphaelite exhibition mounted by the Tate Gallery in 1984. Rossetti sold it to William A. Turner, a young Manchester manufacturer who had recently become a patron. At Turner's sale at Christie's in April 1888 it was bought by the well-known collected Charles Butler, and Lowry acquired it when Butler's grandson sold it at Christie's in 1964. The picture returned yet again to Christie's in November 1987, when it made saleroom history by becoming the first Victorian picture to realise more than £1 million. It is now in an English private collection.

The picture is usually said to have been started in October 1873, when Rossetti was having problems with the Tate version and thinking of offering Leyland a replica instead. Indeed this replica was dispatched to him in December that year, only to be damaged in transit to Liverpool. It was then returned to Rossetti, who restored it successfully. Meanwhile he had overcome his difficulties with the Tate version and decided to send this to Leyland after all. Thus his patron received the version that had been destined for him from the start.

Following the replica's restoration, Rossetti offered it to his old patron George Rae of Birkenhead, but Rae declined it and Rossetti took it with him when he left Kelmscott for good in July 1874. Its later history is obscure, and Life devotes many pages to the question of whether it is indeed the Lowry version. As he points out, evidence provided by the new edition of the letters contradicts accounts of the matter that have hitherto been generally accepted, and certain questions will perhaps only be answered when the Lowry picture is subjected to 'scientific analysis'. The subject need not detain us longer since it is of only tangential relevance to the present enquiry, but it does at least serve to show with what a fiendishly complex area we are dealing.

Two other oil versions may be mentioned briefly: the reduced replica in the Birmingham Art Gallery and the head-and-shoulders-only version, renamed Blanzifiore or Snowdrops, in the Lloyd Webber Collection. The Birmingham picture, in which Jane's hair, somewhat disconcertingly, has been changed from its natural brown to red, is the last of the eight oil versions Rossetti attempted. Commissioned by the solicitor Leonard R. Valpy in 1878, it was completed shortly before the artist's death at Birchington-on-Sea, Kent, on Easter Day 1882. Blanzifiore is one of the pictures that Rossetti created by cutting out the head and shoulders from an abandoned Prosperine. Completed early in 1873, it is in fact a fragment of the very first version, begun the previous autumn. Although the position of the head remains the same, Jane is seen as a sort of goddess of spring, having primroses in her hair and holding three of the eponymous snowdrops in her right hand. At one point Rossetti thought of calling the picture Vanna Primavera, 'after one of the ladies in Dante's Vita Nuova'.

Drawn versions

In addition to the oil versions, there are a number of full-scale drawings of different dates. The prime example is the one in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (fig. 6). Inscribed 'Proserpina' at upper left and unmistakably dated 1871, it was probably executed when Rossetti was living at Kelmscott with Jane and her daughters between July and October that year. When he informed William Bell Scott on 25 August that he had 'made chalk drawings... of the kids and of their mamma,' it is usually assumed that he was referring to this drawing and to the chalk studies of Jenny and May Morris that are now at Kelmscott Manor. The study of Jane was one of his favourite portrayals of his muse. He refused to sell it, keeping it for himself and bequeathing it to her on his death. When Jane died in 1914 it descended to her younger daughter, May, who left it to the Ashmolean in 1939.

In this drawing the figure's pose is already well-established. She holds the pomegranate that ensures her captivity in Hades, and the 'gleam' from the outer world, falling on the wall behind her, is present. However, other details that appear in the later paintings - the tendril of ivy clinging to the wall (suggesting, according to Rossetti, 'the feeling of Memory'), the smoking incense-burner, 'the attribute of a goddess', at lower left, and the cartellino inscribed with a sonnet at upper right - these have not yet been introduced. Rossetti wrote a sonnet for the picture (in Italian, then translating it into English) in November 1872, and the 'accessories', as he called them, made their first appearance in the Tate version of the picture, being described to Leyland in a letter of 4 October 1873.

These details are not only found in the Tate painting, the Turner Butler Lowry version, and the reduced replica at Birmingham, but were a feature of a chalk version that Rossetti was to make after the first two had been completed and the third, the Birmingham picture, commissioned. On 19 February 1879 Rossetti told Jane that he had 'lately' made a replica of his early study for the picture, not wanting to 'part with the original'. The drawing had been done expressly 'for the market', and was 'fully carried out as in the picture'. In other words, it was based on the original study but had been updated to include the 'accessories' introduced into the paintings of 1873-7.

We shall have to wait until the new edition of Rossetti's letters reaches 1879 to see if this chalk replica is identified with an existing or recorded drawing. Was it the same chalk version that another important patron, the wealthy merchant and former MP for Glasgow William Graham, received from Rossetti in 1880? Or was it the one, bearing this date and certainly including the 'accessories', that was with Barbizon House in 1922 and returned to the London art market in 2001 (illustrated in Apollo, June 2001, p. 59)? These two drawings were identical in size (47 x 22 in.) and may have been one and the same, although there is evidence to suggest that more than one chalk replica of this date existed. Virginia Surtees gives a different provenance for the Graham version (The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Oxford, 1971, I, p. 133, no. 233C) to Oliver Garnett in his account of the Graham Collection ('The Letters and Collection of William Graham...', Walpole Society, LXII, 2000, p. 285, no. a29), which suggests that two drawings may have got confused. Moreover Marillier drops a tantalising hint that there were other versions besides Graham's. Having mentioned his 'crayon replica', he adds: 'There may be others also of which no record has been kept.'

The present drawing

Our drawing is something of a discovery, and we must now attempt to determine its date and status. We have to rely entirely on the stylistic and iconographical evidence of the drawing itself. Clearly not quite finished, it bears no inscription, signature or date. Nor do any labels survive on the back to indicate provenance or exhibition history. In fact it seems to have been totally unrecorded before an anonymous vendor, said to be of local family, consigned it to the Salisbury auction-house of Woolley & Wallis in 1981. It cannot be identified with any item in Rossetti's studio sale, held at Christie's on what would have been his fifty-fifth birthday, 12 May 1883. It was not included in either of the memorial exhibitions that took place in London that year, at the Royal Academy and the Burlington Fine Arts Club, or in the 'special selection' of his work that was shown at the New Gallery in the winter of 1897-8. Last but not least, there seems to be no definite reference to the drawing in the extensive Rossetti literature, including Virginia Surtees's catalogue and the new edition of the artist's letters. The references to this in the bibliography above are tentative, indicating letters that would relate to the drawing if the arguments set out below are accepted.

Thrown back on our own resources, the first thing we notice is how close the drawing is to the study of 1871 in the Ashmolean Museum (fig. 6). They are almost identical in size and technique, and both are on two joined sheets of duck-egg-blue paper, as is usual with Rossetti's large chalk drawings. Although our study is less finished, the overall conception is similar, and all the salient features of the Ashmolean drawing, including the pomegranate and the 'gleam' on the wall, are repeated. At the same time there are significant differences when the drawings are compared to the paintings of 1873-7 and the chalk version that was on the London market in 2001. For example, in the two drawings the hair on the far side of the model's head falls in a straight line, whereas it billows out in the other versions (see fig. 5). Similarly with the right hand, which is conceived in one way in the two drawings and quite differently in the painted and drawn versions of 1873-80. Rossetti evidently had second thoughts about this passage when he embarked on the Tate painting, if not earlier. From this point on, the fingers are shown as more articulated, and, in order to explain this articulation, subjected to a more complex scheme of light and shade. Finally and most significantly, our drawing, like the one at Oxford, omits the 'accessories' (tendril of ivy, incense-burner and cartellino) that feature in the painted and drawn versions from 1873 onwards.

All this strongly suggests that our drawing and the Ashmolean study are more or less contemporary, and that both pre-date the paintings of 1873-7 and the chalk drawing, or drawings, of 1879-80. Not only are they so close in technique, handling and imagery; if our drawing had been later than 1873, Rossetti would almost certainly have updated it to include the 'accessories' introduced into the concept that year, just as he did in the chalk version, 'carried out as in the picture', of 1879.

In fact it is conceivable that the two drawings were associated by Rossetti himself. Summing up his difficulties with Proserpine in a letter he wrote to Ford Madox Brown on 6 January 1874, he says: 'The vicissitudes of this blessed picture are as follows. I have begun it on seven different canvases - to say nothing of drawings.' By 'drawings' he cannot mean any later chalk replicas since in 1874 their execution was still several years hence. No other candidates suggesting themselves, it therefore seems likely that he was referring to the Ashmolean study and our variant.

If the argument so far is correct, then any drawings made in 1879-80 are irrelevant to our enquiry; the present drawing is far too early to have been among them. It is also worth adding that so far as the Graham drawing is concerned, size alone rules out a connection, Graham's replica being by some inches larger than our study. But while we may heave a sigh of relief that we can ignore the problems raised by the later chalk versions, we are by no means yet out of the wood. For the question remains of why two such similar drawings should have been carried out in the initial stages of the concept's development.

Eve into Proserpine

Interestingly enough, Allan Life, in his Appendix to Volume VI of the new Correspondence, considers the possibility that there were indeed 'two drawings in a similar pose' at this early date. What prompts this speculation is the fact that although the Ashmolean study is dated 1871, is inscribed 'Proserpina' and shows the goddess holding a pomegranate, her attribute, on the evidence of Rossetti's letters he did not decide to change the figure from Eve to Proserpine until the autumn of 1872. He returned to Kelmscott, as we have seen, on 24 September, and Proserpine was among the first works he proposed to paint in his Cotswold retreat. Several of his letters from this period refer to the fact that the design was adapted from an existing conception of Eve holding the apple. On 30 September, less than a week after arriving in the country, he was telling Charles Augustus Howell that one of the works he would 'probably be doing' was 'that narrow upright picture with the apple (you know the drawing)'. By 22 October he had embarked on the first canvas which, he reminded the same correspondent, was 'from that tall upright drawing you know of Janey with an apple (a pomegranate I shall probably make it).' About the same time he must have asked his assitant, Henry Treffry Dunn, to look out for pomegrantates in London, for on 29 October Dunn reported that 'on enquiry I find pomegranates are in the market at about 6d. apiece & you shall have 3 or 4 packed in Bran & sent to Kelmscott.' They must have arrived a day or two later, together with an account of the Proserpine myth copied by Dunn from Lemprière's well-known Classical Dictionary. On 1 November Rossetti was able to write to Howell asking for 'half payment' for the picture and announcing categorically that 'the subject is Proserpine'. He enclosed the 'extract from Lemprière copied by Dunn. You see the passage about the pomegranate.'

Allan Life suggests two possible answers to the question of why the Ashmolean drawing of 1871 shows Prosperine holding a pomegranate while the change from Eve to Proserpine did not take definite shape until over a year later. One possibility is that the drawing was altered to reflect the new conception after this had been explored on canvas. As Life points out, a change would not have been difficult at this time as Rossetti had not yet devised a reliable method of fixing his chalk drawings, a subject that was to preoccupy him in 1873. Life argues that it would probably have been around 1 November, the date of the letter to Howell just quoted, that Rossetti not only substituted a pomegranate for an apple but inscribed the word 'Proserpina' that appears in the drawing's upper left corner. This would also tie up with Dunn's offer on 29 October to send him pomegranates from London to serve as models.

On the whole, however, Life considers it 'more likely' that there were two drawings, the one now in Oxford, which had always represented Proserpine, and another 'unrecorded design' identifiable as the one showing 'Janey with an apple' to which Rossetti refers in his letters to Howell of 30 September and 22 October 1872. In support of his theory about the Ashmolean drawing, he demonstrates that, far from 'discovering' the story of Proserpine in 1872, and despite Dunn's researches in Lemprière, Rossetti was familiar with the subject at a much earlier date. There is even a reference in William Michael Rossetti's diary for 27 January 1871 to a drawing by his brother of 'Mrs Morris with a pomegranate'. By adding 'the same as Silence', the diarist makes it clear that this was a totally different conception to Proserpine as we know it, the figure in Silence, a work of 1870, being seated. Life suggests, however, that Rossetti 'may have tried to adapt this seated pose to Proserpine'; and at the very least we know that by January 1871 Jane was associated with a pomegranate in Rossetti's mind.

A tale of two drawings

If our drawing did indeed show 'Janey with an apple', it would be all too easy to conclude that here was Life's 'unrecorded design' of this subject, but in fact (it is tempting to say unfortunately) the model holds a pomegranate as clearly as she does in the Ashmolean's version. Nor, on reflection, does it seem very likely that there would have been two drawings similar in every respect except that in one the figure held a pomegranate and in the other an apple.

This does not mean that there were not 'two drawings in a similar pose'. On the contrary, if our drawing and the Ashmolean study are contemporary, then there clearly were. But it does mean that their existence has to be interpreted differently.

Life's other solution, that Rossetti altered the Ashmolean drawing to show a pomegranate rather than an apple, may help us here. For if we conflate the two theories, acknowledging that two drawings existed but arguing that not one but both were altered, then at least we have a working hypothesis. Both studies, we may suppose, were made at Kelmscott in the summer of 1871, and originally showed Eve holding the apple. Although they are extremely similar, close examination does in fact reveal significant differences. In the Ashmolean drawing the head is a fraction more bowed, heightening the sense (as relevant to Eve as to Proserpine) that she is brooding and apprenhensive. At the same time the forms are a little more defined, for example the back of the neck and shoulders and the shape of the square 'gleam' of light. All this suggests that our drawing came first, making it the earliest full-scale exploration of a concept that was to haunt the artist for a decade and result in a host of versions as he either sought the definitive image or reproduced it for commerical purposes. The Ashmolean version, on the other hand, hitherto considered to be the prototype for all the later re-workings, would now be seen as a more highly finished 'fair copy' of our study. No doubt it was drawn direct from the model, but it relies on our version at every turn, and in certain passages, such as the drapery, may deliberately reproduce it line for line.

Life suggests that the Ashmolean drawing never left Kelmscott, where it had probably been executed, while the 'unrecorded design of "Janey with an apple" ' was the one that Howell saw in London. This tends to be confirmed by a letter Rossetti wrote to his brother William Michael on 25 September 1872, the day after he returned to Kelmscott, asking him to forward two drawings from Cheyne Walk: 'one of Janey just begun, for Pandora', and 'the last drawing I was making of Janey'. An explanatory sketch of the latter follows, showing that it was probably the drawing (Surtees 259A) that would eventually result in The Day Dream of 1879-80 (Victoria & Albert Museum, London). As Life observes, the fact that Rossetti does not ask for a study for Proserpine, even though he was already contemplating a painting, strongly suggests that there was already such a study at Kelmscott and that at this stage he saw no need for another.

Circumstances may have changed, however, by 8 October, when Rossetti wrote to his medical friend Dr T.G. Hake. 'The drawing I am about to paint...', he informed him, 'is one which I don't know whether you have seen, as it does not hang up at Chelsea'. This could mean that the drawing seen by Howell was still in London ('it does not hang'). On the other hand, the fact that Rossetti was 'about to paint' it and that it was not hanging at Chelsea might imply that it was now at Kelmscott. This seems even more probable by 22 October when, in the letter already quoted, Rossetti told Howell that he was 'now working on a picture... from that tall upright drawing you know of Janey with an apple'. If he was only 'about to paint' the picture from the drawing on 8 October, he was actually 'working on' it a fortnight later.

Support for this reading of events emerges when we consider the question of how the drawing might have arrived at Kelmscott. Perhaps, after all, it had been forwarded by the long-suffering William Michael, whom Rossetti continued to bombard with requests for items from Cheyne Walk, including clothes and soft furnishings. No further drawings are mentioned in the correspondence, but it may be that a letter is missing. On 30 September Rossetti writes rather tantalisingly that 'the drawing of J.M. was not injured at all, but might have been.' This, however, almost certainly refers to one of the two studies of Jane that Rossetti had asked his brother to send him five days earlier.

Whatever the case, the drawing may not have been sent by William Michael but brought with him when he spent a fortnight at Kelmscott in mid-October. Here again the evidence is elusive. His diary certainly tells us nothing. Finding the details of his brother's breakdown too distressing to record, he had abandoned his narrative on 5 June; and when he resumed it on 3 November he only mentioned his visit in passing. At first sight his published letters seem equally opaque. Not one of the three that he wrote from Kelmscott refers to the drawing, their main concern, understandably enough, being with his brother's health.

But if the letters themselves are unhelpful, their dating is not. The first, written to his mother on 10 October, strongly implies that the writer had arrived in the country that day or the one before. In either case, his advent would have just postdated Dante Gabriel's letter to Hake of 8 October, prompting speculation that when the artist spoke of being 'about the paint' the drawing he was expecting its imminent arrival. Equally, if it turned up in William Michael's luggage a day or two later, that would explain why he could be 'working from' it on 22 October. William Michael, incidentally, was still at Kelmscott that day, the date of the last of his three letters, although he wrote of 'returning to London on Friday'.

By now we seem to have a sequence of events that may not by any means explain everything but at least does not do violence to the existing data. At the risk of repetition, it may be summarised as follows.

Both drawings are made at Kelmscott in the summer of 1871, and both originally show 'Janey with an apple'. When Rossetti leaves Kelmscott on 8 October, he takes our drawing, the earlier and more experimental, with him, but leaves the Ashmolean version, the 'fair copy', behind. Perhaps he felt that so perfect an evocation of his muse should remain as a sort of tutelary genius, while he, if he ever wanted to develop the idea as a painting, could make do with a more preliminary account. In London the drawing was apparently not hung, perhaps precisely because of its relatively exploratory nature. It was not therefore seen by Hake, a good friend but one who related to Rossetti more on the level of poetry than of painting. However, it undoubtedly was seen by Howell, perhaps because Rossetti showed it to him, already telling him that it was a subject he intended to paint, or perhaps because the nosy and assertive marchand amateur made it his business to see it, ferretting it out for himself.

No progress is made on the painting during the year Rossetti spends in London, largely because of the turmoil caused by the publication of The Fleshly School, but on returning to Kelmscott on 24 September 1872 he determines to set about it at last. He does not take our drawing with him, knowing the other version is already there, or ask William Michael to send it on when he writes to him the following day. But by 8 October, when he writes to Hake, he seems to anticipate its arrival. Turning up a day or two later when William Michael comes to stay at Kelmscott, it was apparently in the studio being 'worked from' by 22 October.

Why did he want it when he already had the 'fair copy'? One clue may lie in the implication of his letters to Hake and Howell that the picture was painted from our drawing rather than from the Ashmolean study. In other words, he may have seen the former as an essentially working drawing, to be used in the studio for reference purposes during the ongoing creative process, while the latter, in its perfection, had achieved a life of its own. Such an appraisal would, after all, be in line with the reasoning we have already attributed to him for taking our drawing to London and leaving the other as Kelmscott in October 1871.

The other possibility is that, having decided to transform Eve into Prosperine (an option which, as we have seen, he could have been contemplating as early as January 1871), he wanted to test the changes on the unfinished version before transferring them to the one he rated so highly. Looking at the two drawings closely, it is not difficult to imagine corrections being made on either of them in this area, especially if they were still not fixed. It needed only a few touches. Both apples and pomegranates being spherical, all Rossetti had to do was to add a more prominent stalk and a red gash, revealing seeds or pips, where the goddess has taken the fatal bite. The changes would probably have been made in the last two days of October, after Dunn's pomegranates had arrived and before Rossetti announced on 1 November that 'the subject' of the new picture 'is Proserpine'.

As Life surmises, the inscription 'Proserpina' in the upper left corner of the Ashmolean drawing was probably added at the same time; and logically speaking the 'gleam' behind the figure's head, caused by the light of the outside world penetrating 'some inlet suddenly opened', should also have been introduced in both drawings now. But in fact this is highly unlikely. Throughout the 1870s Rossetti was in the habit of silhouetting his heads against an arbitrary patch of light, which is often, but by no means always, square in shape (for examples, see Surtees, plates 310, 338, 342, 370 and 384). In Proserpine he was simply investing with iconographical significance a formal device that had almost certainly been present from the start.

There is one more argument in favour of both drawings being altered. If they were not, then what happened to the study of 'Janey with an apple' that was seen by Howell in London? It has never, it seems, been traced. It may, of course, not have survived, but is it not at least as likely that it exists in an altered form in the present drawing?

Authorship

Ultimately such questions as where our drawing was at any given time, and when it might have been altered to represent Proserpine rather than Eve, are of secondary importance. What matters far more are its date, something that is easier to establish with a reasonable degree of confidence, and indeed whether it is by Rossetti at all.

When the drawing passed through the saleroom in 1981, it was catalogued as 'after Rossetti'. The implication here that it is nothing but a later copy can be dimissed at once, but we have naturally considered the possibility that it is by Henry Treffry Dunn (1838-1899), already encountered finding pomegranates for Rossetti's use in London markets. A Cornishman who had started his career as a Truro bank clerk, Dunn had come to London and trained at Heatherley's Art School in the mid-1860s. Introduced to Rossetti in 1867, he became his assistant and, apart from one brief period of estrangement, remained with him until the end of his master's life. His duties included carrying out preliminary work on his pictures, making replicas, and acting as a general factotum. He was, Rossetti said, 'the best of fellows and my guardian angel.'

Perhaps the first thing to be said in this case is that it is almost impossible to see when Dunn could have made a copy of the Ashmolean drawing. He could not have done so when Rossetti was at Kelmscott in 1871 since he remained in London at this time, looking after his employer's affairs. If Rossetti had brought the Ashmolean drawing with him when he returned to London in October, then theoretically Dunn could have made a copy between then and his retreat once again to Kelmscott a year later, but we have argued that the drawing was not in London at this time. In any case it seems unlikely that Rossetti would have wanted a replica of what was, after all, only a preparatory study for an unexecuted picture, although undoubtedly a very fine one. Dunn's replicas were usually records of compositions that had achieved their final form in terms of paintings. A perfect example is the chalk version of Sibylla Palmifera that we sold on 16 November 2006 (lot 218), his participation in which is well documented.

During Rossetti's second stay at Kelmscott, Dunn did go down twice. However, his first visit, in April 1873, only lasted a week and was devoted to enlarging a study for The Sea-Spell (Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard University) 'to the Leyland size', that is to say making a cartoon for a picture destined for Leyland, who liked his Rossettis to be on a handsome scale. There would not, therefore, have been much time to copy the Proserpine study. The second visit took place early in March 1874 and, lasting no more than a day or two, was even less conducive to making a copy. In any event, there would have been no more point in copying an old study in 1873-4 than in 1871-2, in fact, rather the reverse. By this time Rossetti had introduced the 'accessories' into the painting, and any copies Dunn made would almost certainly have included them and been executed for commercial gain.

It should never be forgotten that throughout this period Rossetti was desperately short of cash, and that to use Dunn for any other purpose than money-making would have been a waste of resources. In every sense, a copy made in 1873-4 would have anticipated the chalk version of 1879, 'carried out as in the picture' expressly 'for the market'. If that version turned out to be partly by Dunn, it would not be in the least surprising. Indeed, if it was the same version that William Graham received in 1880, then Dunn was certainly involved. Writing to his assistant on 17 February that year, Rossetti refers to this drawing as 'the Proserpine you commenced and I carried on.'

The degree to which Rossetti relied on Dunn is a vexed question, the complexities of which become increasingly apparent as Rossetti scholarship advances. But in this case there is little doubt of Rossetti's authorship. Quite apart from it being difficult to see when or why Dunn would have copied the Ashmolean drawing, everything about the drawing itself points to this conclusion. The psychology of the head is absolutely right, and the handling of the chalk, all the easier to appreciate in the drawing's unfinished state, seems far too free to be by Dunn, whose touch tends to be rather tight and mechanical. If we want a specific parallel, we cannot do better than the study for The Day Dream, also in the Ashmolean, to which, as we have seen, Rossetti probably refers in his letter to William Michael of 25 September 1872 (illustrated in Surtees, pl. 389). The drapery and foliage in this drawing, which is only a few months later than ours, reveal a comparable spontaneity.

It is admittedly unusual in Rossetti's work for two drawings to resemble one another as closely as ours and the one in Oxford, and it is often the sign of a copy that it follows the lines of the original almost too exactly. But we have already noted that the two studies are not by any means identical, and in the light of the numerous versions of the oil, the existence of two similar studies from 1871 is perhaps not so surprising. Even at this early date Rossetti was in search of the perfection that would drive him to 'begin and re-begin' the composition so many times on canvas.

Like the whole Proserpine phenomenon, the drawing raises many questions, only some of which have no doubt been answered here. But we believe it to be a perfectly genuine Rossetti, and, as the earliest full-scale version of one of his most important and personal inventions, an addition to his oeuvre of great interest and significance.

We are grateful to Virginia Surtees and Christopher Newall for their help with this catalogue entry.